Precisely when our group of Dutch-speaking hatmakers came together to create the Fraternity of St James in Blackfriars is unknown. Almost all we know about the formation of the fraternity comes from the ordinances recorded in Guildhall Library, MS 15838. As we show in detail in chapter 4, palaeographical and dialectal evidence indicates that the articles themselves were written down at different times by two different scribes; the content of the articles, sometimes internally contradictory and with no obvious organisational principle, suggests that the collection of ordinances had accreted over some years rather than being devised at one or two sittings. Two dates are given in the manuscript: the year 1501, in article 25, and the year 1511, the date of the agreement and union with the haberdashers. It seems likely, however, that the initial organisation predated the writing of these ordinances; article 2, for instance, indicated that the quarterly fees, or quarterage, members were to pay should be ‘such a summe as of olde tyme haue byn vsed and obserued’. This suggests some antiquity, though ‘olde tyme’ could be ten years or a century and may indeed refer even more vaguely to the general custom of quarterage. And while the members of this Fraternity of St James likely came from all over the City and from Southwark, too, whether the fraternity encompassed all the Dutch hatmakers working in the London area or only a subset of them is unknown. Unlike London citizen guilds, this fraternity had no mechanisms to enforce jurisdiction over all who practised the craft but, rather, could be only a voluntary association.
In many of the provisions, these ordinances closely resemble the regulations of both English and Low Countries guilds. Quarterly assemblies at which fees (quarterage) were paid (art. 14), fraternity feast days with a mass and penalties for non-attendance (art. 15), regulations regarding livery and mandating when it was to be worn (art. 15), payment of fees to move from trainee to member of the guild (art. 21), provision of alms to long-time members of guilds who had fallen on hard times or were elderly and infirm (art. 13, 17), compulsory attendance at funeral observances of brothers and sisters of the fraternity (art. 16): all were usual on both sides of the North Sea. The fees and the fines for breaking rules that are stipulated in the ordinances – e.g. 6s 8d (art. 3, 6, 7, 8, 11 etc.), 20s (art. 5, 9) – were standard amounts in English money (6s 8d was half a mark, 20s was £1). Article 4 forbidding brethren, including journeymen servants, from teaching the secrets of the craft to outsiders fits into the general tenor of guild ordinances throughout Europe. Guilds generally were attentive to confining the particular knowledge or skill of an artisan to members of the craft, the more so when the skill was particular; for instance, the London Pouchmakers in 1501 forbade members from teaching the craft of pouchmaking to those outside the guild.
1 LMA, COL/AD/01/012, Letter Book M, fol. 39r. There is more emphasis on secrecy, however, in the hatmakers’ ordinances than in comparable English ordinances, likely reflecting the importance of controlling the specialised knowledge that allowed the hatmakers to monopolise felt hat manufacture in England.